AntiCrop App Un-Crops Your Photos

AntiCrop un-crops your images. If only it could fix blurry focus, too

It’s easy enough top crop a photograph when you left to much space around the the subject (or just to get rid of some annoying junk at the edges of the frame). But what about the other way around? When you shot too close, for example? Or when you need to rotate an image slightly without having to chop off the corners?

Now, it’s just as simple, with a new universal iOS called AntiCrop. It does one thing: un-crop your images.

Fire it up and skip the (presumably good) instructional video (you never read the manual, right?). Then either take a shot or choose one from your library. Given the fact that un-cropping a photo as you shoot involves no more than taking a step backwards, you will probably be picking a photo you took already.

Then just drag out the crop lines. It’s exactly the same as dragging them into an image, only instead of cutting away the edges, new sections magically appear to fill in the gaps. If you have the right kind of image, it’s pretty amazing.

What’s the right kind of image? One which is surrounded by a plain or semi-regular background. Thus, people in a fairly featureless landscape do well, with the sky and greenery being cloned quite seamlessly. If the background is cluttered or has distinctive objects at the edge of the frame, it’s not so good. I tried it with a photo of me in my office, and the lampshade was duplicated somewhat obviously.

In these cases, AntiCrop is still useful as it paints most of the background in properly, and you can just export to another app to clone out the mistakes.

The other variant is the “lossless straighten,” which lets you twist a photo to straighten (or unstraighten) it and the app fills in the gaps in the corners. Again, with the right photo, it works amazingly well.

AntiCrop is definitely worth getting, and is especially fun to use as it is so smooth and fast in operation. It is also just $1 for a universal iPad and iPhone app. A steal.